.

Reviewed by Word count: words

Notes:

1. V. Rudich, Political Dissidence under Nero: The Price of Dissimulation. Routledge: 1993.

2. As R. correctly notes, Petronius' list is a travesty of the wills that regularly named the emperor (or, under Nero, Tigellinus) as beneficiaries (253). With regard to the theatricality that dominated the discourse of the self under Nero, see S. Bartsch, Actors in the Audience, Cambridge: 1994, which takes up similar questions using a very different approach.

3. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Allen Lane, 1994 (orig. Strahan 1776). Gibbon's famously moralistic image of the poisoning of imperial Roman culture is parallel to R.'s: [quot ]With the Neroian [sic] dissidents we share, although by no means for similar reasons, the bitter experience of living after virtue, that is to say, at a time of disappointment in the inherited set of values, a condition which tends to transform the complexities of human life into ambiguities of language and thus further to problematize the relationship of rhetoric, politics, and ethics[quot ] (256).

4. Compare J. Masters, "Deceiving the reader: the political mission of Lucan Bellum Civile 7", in Reflections of Nero, ed. J. Elsner and J. Masters, London and Chapel Hill: 1994. [quot ]The poem itself is too radically irresponsible for it to have been intended as any kind of manifest for rebellion[quot ] (171).

5. G. Williams, Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire, Berkeley: 1978. M. Griffin, Nero: The End of a Dynasty, New Haven: 1984; J. D. Bishop, Seneca's Daggered Stylus: Political Code in the Tragedies, Konigstein: 1985; J. P. Sullivan, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero, Ithaca: 1985.